Quoted in Juliana Keeping’s Al Jazeera America article on 7 July

Read the full article, ‘Oklahoma town divided on influx of immigrant kids to Army base’ by Juliana Keeping, here: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/7/unaccompanied-minorslawtonoklahoma.html.

‘Fulbright scholar Elizabeth Kennedy, who lives in San Salvador, El Salvador, has researched the experiences of Central American migrants, focusing on unaccompanied children, since 2011. She said sending the kids back to where they came from is neither responsible nor humane.

“These are not people we can consider less than human,” she said. “In fact, they’re desperate, and they want a chance to survive past childhood and adolescence.”

Kennedy has interviewed 400 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador. She said about 60 percent of the children cited fear for their life as a reason for illegally crossing the U.S. border.

In May, El Salvador, a nation of just 6 million, had more than 400 murders — part of a surge in violence in the region. Drug activity in Mexico has splintered, moving into Central America and the Caribbean. Rival gangs MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang are behind most cartel activity in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Kennedy said.

Some of the children she interviewed said their parents were murdered by cartel affiliates. Others, who quit school for fear of violence, gave reports of school directors and teachers who recruited for the gangs. Nearly a quarter said they had been given an ultimatum: Join a gang or be killed.

The children had very little knowledge of U.S. immigration policy. She bristled at the popular demand that unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody be quickly deported, pointing to regular news reports from El Salvador of recent deportees being murdered.

“When the first child is killed, that blood will be on our hands,” she said.